Overview: Thricedotted’s Wikisext is a Twitter bot that uses the instructions and web content from wikihow.com to generate “sexts.” These are often suggestive in nature but rarely use literal sexual language. A new tweet is generated every hour. The bot was deactivated in 2016.
Analysis: Most of these posts use non-sexual language in a suggestive way. This is, however, intentional. In 2011, a new trend appeared on Twitter (largely thanks to @TriciaLockwood) that described intimate communications using platonic language. Thus, drawing upon wikihow instructions for this data produces nonsensical and sometimes humorous tweets.
Part of the bot’s process involves adding pronouns like “I” and “you” to the tweets to make them more intimate.
“Thricedotted is a language hacker who commands a legion of over thirty bots on Twitter, including @portmanteau_bot and @wikisext. They also meta-authored the automatically generated novel The Seeker for #NaNoGenMo 2014. They are a PhD candidate at the University of Washington working in natural language processing.”…I was not able to determine Thricedotted’s real name, as even her personal twitter uses a pseudonym, but she is female.
Programmed using Python, which despite being developed in 1991, I still widely used. This suggests a longer shelf-life for this particular piece, making it especially strange that the bot was intentionally deactivated.
Overview:
Thricedotted’s Wikisext is a Twitter bot that uses the instructions and web content from wikihow.com to generate “sexts.” These are often suggestive in nature but rarely use literal sexual language. A new tweet is generated every hour. The bot was deactivated in 2016.
Analysis:
Most of these posts use non-sexual language in a suggestive way. This is, however, intentional. In 2011, a new trend appeared on Twitter (largely thanks to @TriciaLockwood) that described intimate communications using platonic language. Thus, drawing upon wikihow instructions for this data produces nonsensical and sometimes humorous tweets.
Part of the bot’s process involves adding pronouns like “I” and “you” to the tweets to make them more intimate.
“Thricedotted is a language hacker who commands a legion of over thirty bots on Twitter, including @portmanteau_bot and @wikisext. They also meta-authored the automatically generated novel The Seeker for #NaNoGenMo 2014. They are a PhD candidate at the University of Washington working in natural language processing.”…I was not able to determine Thricedotted’s real name, as even her personal twitter uses a pseudonym, but she is female.
Programmed using Python, which despite being developed in 1991, I still widely used. This suggests a longer shelf-life for this particular piece, making it especially strange that the bot was intentionally deactivated.
HOW2SEXT TWITTER
Questions:
Does this bot's thought process count as sentience?
What are the risks to using social media platforms as part of Digital Literature?
Does the archived version of the piece give the full effect of the original?